Freedom against Liberty, Liberty against Freedom: a Discourse on Rights

A right is a particularized (and reified) liberty or freedom. By “particularized,” I mean that your freedom of speech doesn’t give you freedom of movement or freedom of worship. Each one is a specific thing. By “reified”, I mean that it is an immaterial thing that’s treated as a discrete object that one is able to possess: presumably, we’re endowed with these rights at a certain time (by our creator, or at age of majority.) It’s specifically, in my opinion, the reification that’s the problem with “rights” as a concept – it’s something conceived of as separate from the person, rather than as an attribute of the person.

The Decline of the Dictatorship of the Commentariat: On the Free Speech Editorial

With the caveat that there has been some well-done push back, this is a major newspaper of record picking a side in our dumbest culture war. I maintain that culture wars are stupid, and that cancel culture isn’t really a thing, but the fact remains that cultural phenomena are given life by discussing them. I’m afraid that, to tell you how dumb it is, I’m forced to feed the beast.

CommentaryCameron SummersMarch 23, 2022News Media, Cancel Culture, Moral Panics, Free SpeechComment

We've Run Out of Ideas: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, and Finally as Metaverse

Of course, looking back over this, my reaction to the whole situation is, essentially: “We shouldn’t make a metaverse, and if we do, you shouldn’t be the ones to make it.”

Pestilential Theologies: On the Grand Narrative of Our Time

Mid-plague, it’s fairly easy to view an infection, seemingly from nowhere, as something like the judgment of god: as a sentence handed down that one has been insufficiently rigorous in the measures that they have been taking. It’s easy to look at it this way, because looking at it without this narrative framework is daunting: one in six Americans is Covid-positive. At this point, an individual isn’t really able to remain completely safe: you’re just bending probability curves slightly.

CommentaryCameron SummersJanuary 5, 2022postmodernism, Covid-19, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Talking Heads, Arthur Miller, politicsComment

Tapped: The Psychic Cost of Contemporary Work

You see, the libertarian model – which is based largely on the work of Adam Smith – is that employees sell their labor to employers. Lacking capital, this is the only means by which many of them can avoid homelessness and starvation. It is, in short, a buyer/seller relationship, the way that we might conceive of the sale of a commodity or the purchase of necessary supplies. The logic goes that employing a waiter is the same kind of deal as buying a bottle of floor cleaner for that same waiter to use after close to mop up after the day’s business.

Commentary, Written by: CameronCameron SummersDecember 1, 2021Burnout, generations, Adam Smith, Rights, Political EconomyComment